I don’t think web 2.0 changes the concepts of teaching and learning but it does provide a medium to hyper-connect. By bringing like minded people closer together and creating more rapid response type dialogue the idea of a collective intelligence emerges morphing the paradigm of teacher/student into learner/learner communities. Individual genius is quickly losing relevance as the importance of collective genius emerges. It’s no longer about what you know in the professional world, it’s about what the collective intelligence of your personal learning network knows. Being able to connect to the right people and disseminate information that is useful to solve organizational problems you are facing within your role is becoming of primary importance.
Most of us understand the concept of collective genius if we follow team sports. What makes a basketball or football team great? We’ve all seen the sports team with all-stars that can’t work together. Great teams work collectively together as one unit, one team. With web 2.0 you can replace the word team in the previous sentence with brain or intellect. Web 2.0 allows groups of people working together to form an intellect more powerful than the sum of the individual contributors.
In this sense we all have our interest areas that we like, but now with web 2.0 we can be consumers and contributors to a collective intelligence within our interest area such as gardening, real estate, music. Most the time in schools student work is just for the grade and is totally disconnected from true group learning in the real world. Web 2.0 opens the door of relevance in student learning allowing students to contribute to their true interest area making their contributions and their voice relevant and interesting to them. Allowing our students to engage in their interest area in the real world is a must, how else will they learn and grow into effective contributors to real world intelligences?